Re: UTF-8 with GTK

[Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org>]

Raymond Wan wrote:
>[...] 
>         I guess my original concern is how one would "sell" the idea of
> using UTF-8 as a standard.  I've always thought that UTF-16 would be the
> standard and UTF-8 was just some way to bridge between current systems to
> a unified UTF-16.  And if so [yes, this is related to GTK+, still :) ],
> why doesn't GTK support it.  I guess the answer is that no one expects
> East Asian users to give up on Shift-JIS and Big5 "overnight"...maybe in
> the next year or two, as you've put it...maybe even more.

You don't have to sell Unicode. Like I said before, most documents are
in Word format. Word is in unicode. Most Chinese is, therefore, already
in Unicode. When the web catches up, almost all Chinese will be in
Unicode. The web is the pain here, whereas in most circumstances Word is
the pain. Selling UTF-8 vs UTF-16 vs UCS-4 isn't really an issue, as
they are so readily interchangeable.

UTF-16 has turned out to be the worst of all choices. Java and Windows
use it, and now the Unicode character set has spilled beyond 16 bits
they have all the messiness of UTF-8 without compact ASCII. I assume
these systems will need some substantial rework to handle the change -
they seem to have been built on the assumption of a clean
16-bits-per-code-point environment.

Regards,
Steve